Independent Child Trafficking Guardianship Service

(asked on 25th November 2021) - View Source

Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many children have been supported by Independent Child Trafficking Regional Co-ordinators in each year since that service came into existence.


Answered by
Rachel Maclean Portrait
Rachel Maclean
This question was answered on 2nd December 2021

The Home Office has rolled out Independent Child Trafficking Guardians (ICTGs), an independent source of advice for trafficked children, in two thirds of local authorities across England and Wales.

ICTGs provide one-to-one support for children who have no one with parental responsibility for them in the UK via an ICTG Direct Worker. They also provide an expert ICTG Regional Practice Co-ordinator, first introduced in October 2018, for children where there is someone with parental responsibility for them in the UK.

A staggered approach has been adopted in the delivery of ICTGs, together with built-in evaluations to ensure the ICTG service meets the needs of the children it supports. ICTGs were first introduced to three initial adopter sites in January 2017. Following the findings of the interim evaluation published in 2018, ICTGs were expanded to a further three sites in 2018 and 2019. In May 2021, ICTGs were rolled out to eleven additional areas extending the service to cover two thirds of local authorities across England and Wales.

Data tables published in October 2020 as part of the Assessment of Independent Child Trafficking Guardians – Regional Practice Co-ordinators: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/an-analysis-of-independent-child-trafficking-guardians show the number of ICTG referrals for Direct Workers and Regional Practice Coordinators since 2017, split by local authority area. This data covers the period from Q1 2017 – Q4 2019.

Data tables published in November 2021 in the UK Annual Report on Modern Slavery: 2021 UK Annual Report on Modern Slavery (accessible version) - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) show the numbers of children referred to Direct Workers and Regional Practice Coordinators, broken down by region, in 2019 and 2020. This shows an overall increase in referrals between 2019 and 2020.

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